Snowdrops

This is forecast to be the coldest week of the winter so far. This morning I had to clear a thin layer of ice from my car windscreen and drove through flurries of snow on my way across Norfolk. Yet by lunchtime the sky had cleared and it was a bright but cold day.

In the Rosary Cemetery I paused on my lunchtime walk to take some photographs of the Snowdrops these has naturalised here and there are great clumps of them, splashes of white petals in lieu of the patches of snow which never settled earlier in the day.

I always love it when there is a sense of a season turning, being elbowed out of the way by its impatient successor and today's show of Snowdrops tells that Spring is starting its inexorable push to succeed winter.

Snowdrops, Rosary Cemetery, Norwich

A Fallow Walk

Fallow Deer Buck, Ken Hill Wood, Norfolk

A lovely crisp blue sky day and a little bit of free time saw me take a lunchtime stroll around Ken Hill Wood with my new 'toy a Panasonic Lumix TZ30 compact camera. I have had this camera just under a week and really like it and am enjoying testing in in different conditions.

Posted here are a couple of grab shots, the Fallow Deer above taken at the extreme end of the cameras x 20 telephoto [just under 400mm equivalent]. Not bad for a camera that disappears in the palm of your hand.

The woods were bizarrely quiet today and pretty much devoid of dog walkers which is probably why this Fallow Buck was feeding in the open, in daylight by the side of the path. I see wild Fallow Deer in west Norfolk on a few occasions each year, normally when driving and they are feeding close to the shelter of some woodland, but I'd not seen one in these woods before.

The image below was taken using the TZ30's macro setting and under exposed 2/3 of a stop so that the white petals retained some detail.

Snowdrops, Ken Hill Wood

Walsingham Snowdrops

An annual event in Norfolk are the February Snowdrop walks held around the County to raise funds for charity. One of the most popular of these is held in the grounds of Walsingham Abbey, here the Snowdrops carpet the ground interspersed with smaller clumps of yellow Aconites. The bare branches of the trees carry large clumps of Mistletoe.

For the last couple of years the mild winters have meant that by late February the Snowdrops have been turning over, but this year presumably thanks to the cold weather we have had this year, they were at their best. An additional bit of atmosphere was provided this year by a small girl playing her violin below the ruined arch.

Prior to our walk around the Abbey we had lunch at 'The Pie Pub' aka The Three Horseshoes in Warham http://www.warham.biz/3horseshoes/index.html This pub sits just inland from the north Norfolk coast and has escaped the tarting up that has befallen many Norfolk pubs. The words 'fusion' and 'sitting on a bed of' don't appear on the menu instead they sell a range of home made pies and old fashioned puddings alongside Norfolk Wherry bitter, a great place for a winter pub lunch.

Snowdrops & Aconites

Early, early spring and Summerfield, a corner of scrubby, scruffy Norfolk woodland which for 11 months of the year is unremarkable comes to life. The ground here is covered in great painterly splashes of yellow and white as aconites and snowdrops burst through last autumns still decomposing leaf litter to have their fifteen minutes of fame. Yesterday morning was wonderfully clear and spring like and then at lunchtime the tide brought in a grey overcast sky, it was in this diffuse light that I spent a pleasant ten minutes with the camera photographing these first signs of spring.